Grocery Mogul Makes a $100 Million Statement With Education Gift

Texas billionaire Charles Butt, who made his fortune expanding his family’s grocery store chain, has been donating to education-related causes for decades. Now, the 79-year-old chief executive of HEB grocery stores is making one of his biggest donations yet: $100 million to start a new nonprofit — named for his mother, Mary Elizabeth Holdsworth Butt, a teacher — that will train public school administrators to better serve students. And to do it, he has assembled an A-list cast of trustees, including university presidents, the chief executive of Teach for America, and a former top government official.

Mr. Butt’s donation to public education makes a statement at a time when some other philanthropists continue to draw fire for paying to expand charter schools and school vouchers that help parents to send kids to private institutions. Most recently, Michigan philanthropist Betsy DeVos faced much criticism in advance of her confirmation as secretary of education for having spent millions of dollars on efforts to divert tax dollars to support private schools.

“We live in a time when support and funding for the nation’s public schools is declining and faith in the system is eroding,” Mr. Butt says. “This investment is meant to be a vote of confidence in our public schools.”

The new Holdsworth Center, in Austin, Tex., will work with Texas school districts to change how they identify, train, and support superintendents and principals.

“I have enormous faith in the potential of our public school system and believe that the future economic outlook for our state and our country depends on our ability to provide a high-quality education to each and every child,” he says. “That should be our goal.”

He’s recruited big names to his board, including Robert Gates, the former defense secretary, and Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith College and Brown University. Ms. Simmons will serve as the chair.

“As a graduate of the public schools here in Houston, the fact that he cares enough to designate these children in these seats as the object of his philanthropy, I can’t say enough about how inspirational that is to us,” she says.

Longtime Interest in Public Schools

Education has long been an interest of Mr. Butt’s, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $10.7 billion. He previously founded education advocacy group Raise Your Hand Texas, and his company supports early-childhood literacy program Read 3 and the HEB Excellence in Education Awards, which recognize top teachers, principals, and school districts.

Mr. Butt believes that teacher quality greatly influences student achievement but that strong principals are essential to developing and retaining good teachers.

“If we want to get to the root of making long-term, sustainable improvements to public education, we’ve got to start with school leadership,” he says.

So Mr. Butt convened a group of philanthropists, business leaders, and educators to study ways to cultivate leadership in schools. A team traveled throughout the United States and as far away as Singapore to identify what works.

They drew up plans for a center that will work with school districts over a period of about five years to change their systems for identifying, training, and supporting school leaders, starting at the top with superintendents and working down the ladder to principals. It will provide data and analytics tools to help school districts identify problems and strengthen their strategies to build strong leaders.

Among those Mr. Butt recruited was Ms. Simmons. After retiring from her career as a university president, Ms. Simmons, a product of segregated Houston public schools, was looking for a way to give back to the inner-city institutions whose teachers and principals instilled in her high aspirations.

“Looking at the plans for the center, thinking about my experience with the public schools here in Texas, thinking about what I have learned as a college president,” she says, “it was a no-brainer for me to get involved in this.”

She especially appreciates the fact that the educations will be able to support one another for a long time to come. “For the lifetime of these leaders, they will have a strong group of people they can consider their colleagues and get support from throughout their career.”

The center will select its first group of participants from a pool of 26 school districts invited to apply. The goal is work with 3,000 educators over the next 10 years.

A Tough Cause

Public education is a contentious topic in philanthropy and public policy. In addition to Ms. DeVos, other philanthropists who have drawn blowback for supporting alternative education causes include Eli Broad, a backer of charter schools, and Bill and Melinda Gates, supporters of charter schools and the Common Core.

“Many American philanthropies are fatigued with education reform and making investments in public education because they have not seen the kinds of results they would like to see,” says Tonya Allen, chief executive of the Skillman Foundation, which supports school programs in Detroit. “A lot of philanthropic donors in general run into hard problems in education systems, throw their hands up, and suggest the only way to fix it is to replace it.”

For example, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million effort to overhaul Newark public schools is largely considered a failure.

But the difficulty of improving public education is not a good reason to retreat, Ms. Allen says:

“It is more of a rationale for us to lean in and to be working more collaboratively with public entities and creating a common vision so we can actually see the gains we desire.”

Improving education in Texas is a big task. The state’s school districts serve 5.3 million students — 10 percent of U.S. children, according to the Holdsworth Center. And Mr. Butt hopes that eventually others will replicate the work of the Holdsworth Center.

The success of the center will depend largely on the willingness of school districts to “absorb” alumni of its programs and adapt to what they’ve learned rather than force them to conform to traditional practices, Ms. Allen says.

So far, feedback from Texas legislators, superintendents, and principals has been positive, Mr. Butt says.

After all, Ms. Simmons asks, “how can you turn away the idea that the leaders of these schools will have the time to study, learn, reflect, formulate, and have expert assistance,” all at no cost? “It’s not the kind of thing people are likely to object to. It’s all about helping and bringing something to the table.”